Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A packet communication network typically includes a number of network devices, such as switches, routers, traffic controllers and traffic shapers that transmit, reroute or manage flow of data packets across the network. Each data packet, in addition to data, also includes a number of control fields disposed in the data packet's header. Such fields include, for example, a source address and a destination address of the data packet, type of the data packet, a protocol associated with the data packet, and/or the like. A data packet is often parsed by a parser in accordance with a set of predefined network protocols and rules that, in aggregate, define the encapsulation structure of the data packet. For example, when parsing an Internet Protocol (IP) data packet, a parser examines an IP version number (e.g., version 4 or 6) of the data packet. A classifier classifies a data packet based at least in part on the parsing results.